The Crucible
by Stephensmat
Summary: Everyone who endures The Crucible comes out the other side as a totally different person. Lara Croft became the Tomb Raider on the Isle of Yamatai. But it wasn't a single moment, it was a series of intense experiences over the course of the expedition. These are the moments of transformation. A series of drabbles, based on the reboot. Rated Hard T, for heavy themes.
1. Prey

Lara had thought she was overwhelmed when the boat broke apart. But as scared as she was, she knew she would be okay; because Roth was there, holding out a hand to her. Roth had always protected her. He'd always looked after her, and made her feel better. She knew he would catch her.

And then she slipped through his grip and dropped into the ocean.

Lara was a strong swimmer. At least, she was in a warm swimming pool. She'd scuba dived in the Australian Barrier Reefs, she'd competed in freestyle events... But fully clothed, bleeding, vaguely concussed and with ice-cold seawater pouring into her lungs as she screamed... It was an entirely different experience; and Lara was certain she would drown before she could remember so much as a single swimming lesson.

_The first thing they taught us in swim class was called the Deadman's Float. _She thought distantly. _I always thought that seemed a little ghoulish._

She remembered making it to shore, but she didn't remember swimming. She remembered lightning, but she didn't remember clouds. She remembered seeing the others, further up the beach, but she didn't remember seeing lifeboats...

And then she heard the sound of something swinging through the air behind her, and she remembered nothing at all.

* * *

She saw the dawn starting to break outside the obscene Butcher's Den she found herself in. A big meat locker, for human meat. The floor was thick with blood and discarded bones.

But what hit her first was the smell.

Lara had seen sacrificial chambers before. She had seen the ancient chambers where cannibalism was performed in centuries past. They had all been... Dry. Dusty. This place was still slick with fresh gore.

Lara had come from a wealthy family. And though she had religiously made an effort to support herself _without_ her waiting trust funds, her family had been wealthy enough that she had been taught what to do in the event of being abducted. Her job was to stay calm, keep from antagonising her captors, and do what she could to make friends with them, until rescue could come.

Lara knew all these rules, and obeyed none of them. She wasn't being held to ransom; she was hanging upside down from a meat hook, surrounded by people who had already been skinned, swaying above what was left of yesterdays menu.

The only way to get free of the ceiling, was to get to the floor, and do it very suddenly. The floor was littered with deadfall sticks and jagged bones. She tried to miss them as she broke free and fell.

She failed.

She had screamed when she pulled the spike out of her side. She had screamed, and bawled, and whimpered and cried, and thrown up. She may even have passed out for a few minutes.

Once she found her way out of the meat locker, she had found the altar. A small candlelit structure... with a fresh body crucified across it.

It was Steph.

Lara was sick to her stomach. She'd never been close with Stephanie during the voyage, but to see anyone strung up like this...

It struck Lara suddenly that she and Steph were the only women in the chamber full of bodies.

_So did they keep me alive because they wanted to keep the meat fresh? _She thought. _Or something much worse?_

Once free of her ropes, Lara staggered her way through cave-ins, runaway mudslides, passages so narrow it crushed her ribcage...

_Find Roth. Need Roth. Keep Moving. Need the others. Find the others. Find the Endurance Crew. Need the Endurance. Heh. The name of the ship was Endurance. Funny. No, nothing's funny. Need Endurance. Find Roth. Roth will help you!_

She pushed through, swallowing dirt and mud and black, sticky blood from human and animals... Until the passage had caved in and dumped her in a rushing underground river. She had tried to swim up, catch a breath of air, but the underground passage had no air pockets, only solid stone.

Lara fought her panic. The underground river had doused her torch instantly. No light could hope to shine down here. She had no chance to swim, no direction to swim in. She was at the nonexistent mercy of the current, hoping that it was flowing out somewhere she could breathe...

As dizziness started to claim her from oxygen deprivation, she prayed the river would get where it was going, and get her there quickly.

She was spat out of a mountainside, but she wasn't even close to done yet; the current carrying her along a nearly straight drop. The ride back to the shoreline slammed her against every tangle of thorns, every jagged edge. She was a bloody pulp of barely moving flesh, until finally she saw daylight again.

With long sobbing breaths, Lara wrapped her arms around her middle, wretchedly waiting for the world to stop spinning.

* * *

Her senses lit up like someone was screaming a warning at her. In the far distance, she could hear them coming. Men, with their gun and their knives. They were laughing. They knew she had escaped, and they were laughing. They would kill her, and God knew what else, and it was a fun game for them to play.

_Keep Moving. Keep Moving. Keep Moving. Keep Moving. _

Sobbing, Lara fought her way upright and ran, trembling from the cold, trembling harder from the fear. Her fingers were broken, two of them sticking out at odd angles. She yelled as she tried to straighten them, whimpered as she tried to tear her shirt and bandage them **and** keep running, all at the same time. Blood was running down her legs from a thousand cuts.

_Find Roth. Need Roth. Keep Moving. Need the others. Find the others. Roth will save you!_

And then the thunder cracked the sky, and poured heavy driving rains down on her.

She had wondered why her screams hadn't drawn her captors attention back in the Butchers Den, and now she knew. They'd heard screaming before. Just as the hawks had heard from the rats and rabbits.

Prey often squealed.

Lara ran until she couldn't see their flashlights any more and shivered against the nearest rock wall, turning the frequency dial of her emergency beacon. "Hello? This is Lara Croft! Can anyone hear me?"

She was cold, wet, bleeding, and calling for help as loud as she could, even as she was being hunted.

She just needed to find Roth. He would know what to do. He would protect her.

She was Prey.

* * *

**AN**: _First one down. This isn't going to be a novelization, only a series of drabbles. I don't know how many there will be. This story will cover the game, and Lara's transformation at various points. I might continue beyond the end of the game, I don't know yet. It depends on how things turn out._

_Read and review!_


	2. Hungry

Her first kill was a deer.

She had never been a spoiled child. Her classmates saw to that. Lara had gone to all the finer schools, born into a family lucky enough to afford them; but her classmates barely listened to the lectures, barely looked at the textbooks. Lara hated them. She was not a fool enough to think that her privilege was normal. She knew she was smart. Knew she was beautiful. She had listened to Roth telling her stories of her bloodline. All the things that the Crofts did over the years.

The lessons fascinated her, but school bored her. She was touched with inspiration; and she knew she was meant for something else, something grand. but she didn't know what it was.

But she couldn't believe she was meant for _this_.

Hunting was tradition in an English Aristocrat. With her parents... gone, Lara could have taken her trust fund early, but didn't. She had paid her own tuition, earned her own keep. But it was still the scene of her early life. Anyone with a Manor and Title had tried their hand at fox hunting. Lara had taken up archery at an early age... But she'd never enjoyed bloodsports, just on principle, and she'd never fired a bow with broken fingers, or shivering, trembling limbs.

_Don't think about it. Do it. Don't think about it. Do it. Don't think about it. Do it. _

The deer had heard her coming, and Lara cursed herself. She had seen wolves on the island, and knew that they could run down a deer with endurance. She didn't have that option. A wolf would have no problem tracking her blood trail. If she didn't get some food, the damn _deer_ would be a thousand times more than she could handle if it decided to turn and fight.

The deer ran out of sight, and Lara tried to chase after it. She pushed harshly through the brambles and bushes. She knew she wouldn't find it on the other side. She'd given it so much warning with her clumsy noise it could be anywhere by now.

Lara returned to the tree, trying to see a little further... And she saw it. It had retreated to the far side of the rocks, but it couldn't see her... She was fifteen feet off the ground.

Lara drew her salvaged bow, staring down a trembling arrow; praying that her hands would be steady enough to keep her from starving to death. Despair set in as she released the arrow. She was clawing for one more hellish day in this nightmare place.

_Don't think about it. Do it. Don't think about it. Do it. Don't think about it. Do it. _

The deer never knew what hit her. And it _was_ a her. Lara was able to discern that as she brought her next arrow closer. The arrowhead was small but sharp, and she began slicing its fur away, wondering if she could make some gloves, or sleeves, or _something_ to hold back the wind and rain.

A smaller voice squealed from her left, and she snatched up her bow. The new animal was... young. It was a deer, barely two months old, and Lara knew instantly that she had just orphaned the little one.

It was terrified of her, but unable to leave the mother's body...

_Bambi's mother._ Lara thought bleakly. _I just shot Bambi's mother._

The helpless creature squealed, and Lara knew it was doomed. More so than her. She at least had learned the protection of silence. The baby's squealing would call down every carnivore on the island.

Lara notched another arrow into her bow... and put it right between the little creature's eyes. Another kill to add to her pathetic food supply. Even the deer were scrawny and starving on the isle of Yamatai.

She had thrown away more than a few of her promises to herself today. She had promised that she wouldn't participate in hunting. She had promised herself she wouldn't give way to despair. She had promised herself she wouldn't be cruel to anything or anyone that was helpless. But now she didn't care. If one of her friends had come by with a chocolate bar, she would have caved their head in with a rock to get a bite of it.

_Find Roth. Roth will save you. Keep moving._

It was less than two days since she'd had her bunk on the ship. She had thought her cabin was 'roughing it'. She had run her fingers through her hair and adjusted her necklace, and scrolled through the various albums on her iPod, congratulating herself on planning out her own expedition and having an adventure.

And now she was a savage. Hunger had beaten the civilization clean out of her. She looked down at the innocent, adorable, lovely little creature; and she was ready to eat the meat raw off its bones.

But she didn't feel... savage. She didn't feel evil, or callous or cruel. She was just cold. She was just scared.

She was hungry.

* * *

**AN**: _Read and Review_


	3. Student

Yamatai was her original intention. She had sought this place. Not this way, of course; but she had pushed them. She had pushed, and pleased and insisted. The boat kept going long after what made sense, long after what was typical. Maybe even a little past what was safe. Whitman was determined, his creditors and his ex-wives hounding him. Sam was totally devoted to Lara, arguing her case every night, long after the decision was made. And Roth...

_Find Roth! Roth will save you! Just keep moving!_

But even as Roth quietly told her it was getting too dangerous to keep going, and how supplies were getting low, Lara hadn't been worried. What was the worst that could happen?

She had thought to find the island, land and spend a few days unearthing its mysteries, retreating every night to her tent, and her well cooked meal, maybe catch a fish or two for her dinner; while her friends traded campfire stories and toasted their imminent fame and fortune from all the discoveries they had made.

She hadn't found the Dark Place. It had found her. Its jaws had leaped up from the merciless ocean to rip the Endurance apart and devour them all whole.

The Isle of Yamatai had been a place of many mysteries, all of which would chew her up and spit out the bones. Everything that moved on the godforsaken rock was trying to kill everything else.

She had known the nature of the food chain from third grade. She had known bushcraft from her lessons with Roth. She had known about First Aid and the priorities of shelter or water or food or clothing from the classes she had taken in preparation of their first trip.

She had known the pagan rites. The human sacrifices of many cultures.

Within an hour on Yamatai, Lara realized she hadn't known anything.

The Island had beaten the civilization out of her and reduced her to raw survival force. But her mind was still sharp as it ever was, soaked in adrenaline and with the stakes raised to a matter of life and horrifying death.

She folded herself into a ball, clutching at her bow, just watching. Watching the patrols of madmen and fanatics creeping past her tree, not knowing their target was over their heads. She had watched the hawks with their razor sharp eyes picking out meals from the long grass. She had watched the prey animals sit up with sudden alertness, survival instincts of their own telling them when they were in danger.

She thought she knew ancient cultures and languages, but then she found the villages. She learned the architecture of a culture so deeply ingrained in the thinking of their people, that even in the valley of storms and landslides, they still built their shelters to be recognizable as Japanese, Greek, Inca, even German...

She learned that gods and ancient powers were totemic. They all had different names for their Gods, but they all worshiped the storms, the predators, the sun, the moon... The same story of the Lost Souls, painted over and over again in their tortured hand.

She learned the differences between carefully written letters of various languages in a textbook, and the wild desperate graffiti clawed on the walls, begging for someone to hear their message. She learned the rise and fall of empires from the leftovers that the Island had not deigned to crush into pulp.

The message was the same, written over and over, language after language, culture after culture, century after century...

_**NO ONE LEAVES!**_

She had thought she knew agility from the strength training in the gym. She was almost Olympic-level in gymnastic skill. She had won school awards, trophies, ribbons. She thought she knew how to run, how to dodge around obstacles, walk a balance beam, and clear hurdles.

She was wrong. Yamatai had taught her how to run, _really_ run, as her life truly depended on it. Yamatai had taught her how to get around obstacles, and to avoid being knocked down without slowing even a little bit. Yamatai had taught her how to scamper along a tiny ledge, or climb a wall of sheer stone and ice.

Lara didn't weep for it any longer. She soaked herself in it, devoured everything she saw and heard. She had the mind of an honor student, and this deadly, dangerous education would mean her life.

She had the energy of the place now. The hungry savagery of predator and prey, the dance of strike and escape. She knew when to attack, and when to defend. She knew sight lines and taking cover.

And for all that, she was still running. Yamatai had taught her how to survive hell on earth, but not how to claim a place in the Damned Kingdom of the Maniacs and the Monsters.

She thought she knew what she was capable of. She thought she knew her limits. Every hour that passed taught her differently.

_Find Roth! Roth will save you! Just keep moving!_

The days were long and cold. The nights were worse, but she was learning. These were lessons she'd never thought to learn. Lessons that she could not learn any other way. A thousand lessons in things that only Yamatai could teach her.

She was a student.


	4. Killer

Lara had learned how to shoot in her athletics was Olympic level with a bow and arrow, pretty good at marksmanship with a bolt action rifle...

She'd never used a handgun before.

The gun she had taken had only one bullet left. She didn't know where all this ammunition had come from, but she didn't much care. One bullet had been all she needed.

At every battle, every skirmish, she had shouted across to them, begging them not to attack her, begging them to leave her alone. They never did. They were predators. They did not care what their Prey begged of them.

She had escaped with a zip-line; the fire covering her retreat. She had lost the others completely.

When she finally made another camp, she curled tightly into a ball, still feeling the man's hands on her flanks, still feeling the blood squishing between her fingers.

Her memory was playing tricks on her. Sometimes she thought she'd shot him with his own gun, sometimes she thought she'd hit him with a rock, sometimes she was convinced she'd gutted him with the over and over, the one detail that was certain was that she'd practically exploded his brains. His every thought, his every memory, his every idea, or dream or emotion or nightmare... She could see all of it exploding, every time she closed her eyes.

She curled herself tighter again, as the winds howled horrifically around her camp. Even against the wind, she could hear the slightest sound of something moving, and Lara rolled instantly. No thought, no fear, no hesitation. There was a sound, and she struck out.

She came out of her sobbing ball in a combat crouch with her teeth bared, and her knife drawn, ready to slash. But it wasn't one of them.

It was a wolf.

The animal was old, it's fur threadbare. It was alone. Lara knew that instinctively. The old hunter had been cast out by the pack. Wolves usually cared for their elders, but not on Yamatai. There was no loyalty here. No loyalty. No hope. No mercy. No escape. There was no weakness the wolf's old eyes, no self-pity. It was debating whether to eat her or not. Lara felt the blood of three would-be killers on her face, washed by the hot tears that rolled down her cheeks, but her gaze didn't 'd already picked her target. She put the knife right between its eyes...

The wolf and the woman glared electrically at each other across the flames... and the wolf backed away.

Lara dropped, done for a while. The adrenaline had spiked during the fight, then faded at the campsite; spiked again, then faded, and left her hollowed out and exhausted. She thought for a while about the Wolf. The animal was a hunter. skilled, experienced killer, and it had backed down when faced with her at her most emotional, her most vulnerable. It could smell the blood on her. It could smell death on her hands, and it had backed away.

Even six hours before, the sudden spike of fear would make her run away, and now it made her stand. If she'd heard a twig snap six hours ago, she would have run for cover and then turned back to look and see what it was. But now she reacted with war. She'd heard the sound and she was instantly on alert, in a full combat crouch, weapons drawn and ready.

_One confirmed kill, and I'm ready to do it again._ She thought bleakly. _I used to survive by running, until ten minutes ago, when I survived by killing. And now it's my default position._

Lara tried to sleep, clutching her blade in one hand, and her stolen, empty gun in the other. _Roth, where are you?_

The rain washed over her grime coated hands, but the blood would not come off. She told herself it hadn't changed her that much. She reminded herself how easy it was, and surely something truly evil couldn't be that easy. She told herself that she was just like a solider, or a police officer, or any one of a dozen other professions that were respected... which could still cause body-counts.

She had to tell herself these things because the bullet couldn't come back, and she wasn't ready for what that meant.

She didn't feel guilt. She knew what her victim was. She knew what he was going to do, and she knew only one of them was walking away from that. She didn't feel guilt.

Which, oddly enough, was the hardest part. She'd just taken a human life. Shouldn't she feel remorse? At least, more remorse than she clearly did now? Should it have been so... easy?

Somewhere in the distance, someone cried out in horror as something exploded so completely that it would never be put back together again. Somewhere in the other direction, an ancient wolf howled, seeking another predator to come and face it in mortal combat, with survival the only prize.

She knew exactly how both of them felt.

She was a Killer.


	5. Disciple

Prayer was a tricky thing on the Island. Lara had never considered herself very religious. She had studied endless forms of worship to one god or another. The Ancient Cultures were wrapped in their adoration of the same things. The Sun, The Moon... They worshiped lions and crocodiles and lightning and volcanoes and wolves and spiders and planets and stars.

As part of her studies in school, Lara had traced the origins of many religious cultures. Plenty of cults and pagan rites were offshoots and derivatives of the cultures that came before them.

But what each and ever definition of faith came down to, was a puny nothing mortal, begging for compassion from forces beyond their comprehension.

Her father had told her that every myth had its root in at least one truth, one fact. Lara had believed him, and told herself that if she wanted to understand the truths of the universe, she had to start with that one unimpeachable fact.

Lara had originally come to Yamatai, hoping to understand. Hoping to learn something more. It was a search for fact... But she had found something far more bone chilling.

Lara had prayed for rescue, then prayed for help... But she didn't expect an answer. She had never really thought much about the Supernatural, though she knew people that did. But she had no respect for people who ignored God until they needed a magic wand to rescue them.

The ones that came before her on the island had a thousand different names for gods and goddesses. Mathias had bent a whole Island of lunatics to his manic needs by invoking the names of Ancient Queens.

One thing that Lara had discovered: The ones that got anything out of any faith, even as all others turned jaded around them... The true believers all had the same quality. They asked to understand, before they asked for help.

Lara wanted neither. She only sought escape.

Each religion had its soothsayers. Even Mathias claimed to know exactly what to do. Prophecy was the point of any cult, any faith. Lara had been fascinated with the story of the Oracle of Delphi; but she never really believed the future could be foretold.

It was a position that seemed justified when she got through to the rescue choppers. Warnings from Lunatics and cultists didn't add up. She controlled her own destiny.

And then the Storm swept into existence. It didn't roll in off the ocean, it didn't sweep down from the mountain. One moment there was nothing, and then there were stormclouds, spontaneous and savage. It tore through the helicopter with lightning and hail... and then they were gone.

It defied logic. Defied reality. It defied Lara's whole view of the universe. For a few moments, Lara actually wondered if she'd been pushed over the edge; and maybe her overloaded, lonely little brain had finally snapped from the sheer total psychotic weight of the madness she had been forced through.

But there was nothing imaginary about the people calling for help... or the bodies.

And as she ran to try and find them before Mathias' people did, the warnings crystallized into prophecy in her mind. She had been warned, over and over.

_**NO ONE LEAVES!**_

Lara knew she was changing. She knew it. She had already lost so much of herself to the island. One by one, the aspects of her personality had been smacked out of her.

But something she hadn't expected to lose was her skepticism. She hadn't expected to become a believer. But when she believed that storms and typhoons could be conjured from nothing before her eyes... when she accepted that the wind that tried to gust her off the face of a mountain was angry at her efforts, and not the product of simple weather systems...

When she stood before her skeptical, reasonable, educated friends, and told them that the Island would not allow them to leave until the Dead were allowed to Rest...

Lara never expected to become a believer, but the Island had beaten reason out of her soul; and denial was quick to follow. She found herself reading Matthias' journal closely, hoping to separate the myth from the fact, once again; with a whole new view on what was possible.

Even a few days before, she would have called it coincidence. It would have been coincidence that their ship had been devoured on the rocks, even though it was fully equipped with sonar to find the ocean floor. It would have been coincidence that the rescue plane had been struck by lightning from a clear blue sky. It would have been coincidence that Sam, descendant of the Sun Queen would have been spared the bonfire at her feet by a sudden slap of stormwind...

Her father would have believed. He was forever chasing myths and legends, looking for the heart of all of them. Lara had always hated that. Even before the mission that had claimed him, the Lord Croft and Conrad Roth would run off and leave her, for months at a time, chasing things that didn't exist...

Or did they?

The simple acceptance of the evidence of her own senses had expanded her world considerably. If Yamatai had an angry Storm God at its heart, then what of others? What of the Egyptian Pyramids? Or Lost Worlds full of Dinosaurs in the deep jungle? The historical possibilities of King Arthur as a real person? Or for that matter, what about vampires and goblins? Where did the line between myth and history get drawn, when you resolved to free your friends from Possession?

Those that believed in any Gods or Goddesses had one thing in common. They each had a moment of Revelation, when their thinking shifted and they knew without question that they would live their lives differently, make their choices differently, based around a new certain truth...

Lara had the moment when she was aboard the helicopter. Himiko ceased to be an anthropological idea and became the driving force, as she grabbed for the controls. Lara must have seemed like a madwoman to the pilot; worse even than Mathias, trying to force him to land the chopper, willing to shoot the man who had come to free her from the unholy place...

Her sudden faith in something she hated and feared had slain someone she loved, and driven a wedge between her and the only people in Purgatory that she counted as allies.

Lara could not be swayed. She was as certain as Mathias, though dedicated to the opposite goal.

She was a Disciple.

* * *

**AN**: Read and Review!


	6. Predator

Grimm, the tough old bird, had taken three of them with him. He had done it, not only to save Lara, but to save himself. If he had so much as stopped struggling, he wouldn't have been Grimm any longer. Of all of them, the Island had touched him the least. Lara envied him for it. She was changing, and the only other option was to die.

She had to change into a survivor, and she did. Grimm had to change into a prisoner, and he refused. It was why she lived, and he died.

And then Lara did something unusual. She vowed to make the bastards pay.

It was a strangely empowering feeling; the sudden certainty that she had a new goal. For the first time since the boat had sunk, Lara was after something more than living to see the dawn. She wanted more than escape. She wanted victory. She wanted blood. She wanted to make them face the same unholy carnage that she had faced.

She could hear them running on the far side of the temple walls. They were jockeying for position, taking places on the far side of the stone walls and ornate doors.

Even a few days before, Lara would have wept for the stonework as she taped the launcher to her shotgun. And then she realized suddenly that she didn't care.

"She has a grenade launcher!" A voice shouted in panic. Panic. Just for a second, Lara found it intoxicating. These beasts had slaughtered and pillaged anyone unlucky enough to come near... And now they were afraid of her.

"That's right!" She heard her voice howl exultantly. "**Run**, You Bastards!"

It was the exact moment she had become a better predator than them. A hunter among hunters. A Lion amongst Jackals. She had killed, she had defeated her hunters... but until that moment, they had never run _away from her_.

The layers of the island went back to pre-Christian times, and ended with modern shipwrecks. The worst elements of human beings had been brought to bear on anyone unlucky enough to survive. The island had beaten the gentleness, beaten the compassion, beaten the simple humanity clean out of all of them and replaced it with madness and bloodlust.

And Lara Croft, the girl who had sobbed over her first campfire, simpered over her lightest wounds, and wept for a dead deer... was now locked and loaded for war; an equal match for all of them put together.

She wasn't the latest resident in the Tombs of Purgatory any longer.

She was the Predator.

* * *

**AN**: _Read and Review_


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